In the field of telephony, call centers exist for handling transactions for companies marketing to consumers of products and services. One function available in many call centers is proactive outbound calling of potential new and/or existing customers for the purpose of engaging those customers in the sales process (also known as Outbound Dialing Campaigns). The purpose of the Outbound Dialing Campaigns is to generate new transactions. Outbound Dialing Campaigns are run inside a call center using an automated dialing device that has been placed in automatic dialing mode. Automatic dialing modes may include progressive dialing mode and predictive dialing mode. Unfortunately, Automatic Outbound Dialing Campaigns do not guarantee a connection between the live potential customer and a live agent after the call is answered. In predictive dialing, the system dials more calls than there are available agents to handle the calls based on the assumption that some of those call attempts will not be successfully connected. Therefore, an agent may not appear as available for all the calls that are placed.
In progressive dialing mode the telephony system places a call only when it discovers an agent available to take the call. However, the designated agent may become distracted by some other processing tasks and suddenly become unavailable to accept the dialed outbound call. Some progressive and predictive dialers wait to begin the dialing process based on an “average time on call” or an “average processing time,” of the live agent or agent(s) that are available to take calls. Additionally, traditional methods have implemented predictive dialers and progressive dialers as an add-on or third party device within a company's telephony system.
A Private Branch Exchange (PBX) is a telephone exchange system that facilitates connections among the internal telephones of an organization, such as a corporation, business, or other private telephone network. The PBX allows these internal telephones to connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) via trunk lines and/or via the Internet. A hosted PBX system delivers PBX functionality as a service, available over the PSTN and/or the Internet. A telephone company typically provides hosted PBXs using equipment located on the premises of the telephone company's exchange. In a hosted PBX system, the customer organization does not need to buy or install PBX equipment and the telephone company can use the same switching equipment to service multiple PBX hosting accounts in multiple locations. Furthermore, Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) gateways can be combined with traditional PBX functionality enabling businesses and organizations to use their managed Internet/Intranet to help reduce long distance expenses and to enjoy the benefits of a single network for voice and data, which gives greater cost savings, mobility and increased redundancy.
A hosted VoIP PBX system allows the users to place calls from, for example, session initiation protocol (SIP) devices over the Internet. A full description of the SIP process can be found in the Network Working Group's white paper entitled “SIP: Session Initiation Protocol,” by J. Rosenberg, et al that was published in June 2002 by The Internet Society. SIP devices can include telephone style terminals or web-based “soft phones” that provide voice calling via a virtual PBX. The virtual PBX has the ability to route calls and other communications out to traditional communications networks such as PSTN systems. In a common configuration, a SIP device has a static Internet protocol (IP) address in its configuration settings. This static IP address is used for standard forwarding of IP packets for call routing, SIP services and load balancing. The IP addresses allow SIP device service requests, such as a request to initiate, transfer, or terminate a call, to be forwarded to a fixed set of servers or load-balancers. These SIP devices and SIP services allow for the integration of a progressive dialer system within the functionality of the hosted VoIP PBX system.
The integration of the progressive dialer system within the functionality of the hosted VoIP PBX system is made possible through the use of IP addressing methods. IP addresses are typically a set of numbers that identify the location of a port in an Internet protocol network. Unfortunately, these addresses are often difficult to remember and keep track of. Therefore, Internet architecture includes natural language addressing mechanisms in the form of Universal Resource Locator (URL) addresses. These URL addresses include typical web addresses such as www.google.com®. A URL address allows an administrator or the telephony system to assign a natural language address to an IP device or service. This natural language address can be resolved back to an IP address using a Domain Name System (DNS) server.
The DNS translates URL and other web addresses into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS implements a distributed database to store this name and address information for all public hosts on the Internet. DNS assumes IP addresses do not change (are statically assigned rather than dynamically assigned). In SIP, the IP addresses typically have statically assigned IP addresses. The DNS database resides on a hierarchy of special database servers. When client SIP devices issue requests involving Internet host names, a software tool called the DNS resolver (usually built into the network operating system) first contacts a DNS server on the lowest level of hierarchy to determine the destination server's IP address. If the DNS server does not contain the needed mapping address, it will in turn forward the request to a different DNS server at the next higher level in the hierarchy. After potentially several forwarding and delegation messages are sent within the DNS hierarchy, the IP address for the given Internet host name eventually arrives at the DNS resolver. The DNS resolver is then in turn able to resolve the DNS address of a SIP device request by directing it to the destination server IP address as resolved by DNS.
While ordinary DNS practices can respond to simple requests as described above, a hosted VoIP PBX environment needs a method of routing communications between its various components. For example, communications between a SIP device and the VoIP PBX require an addressing method such as IP and DNS to “bridge” the packets of data being routed between these components. Furthermore, there exists a need for a hosted PBX environment that can provide progressive dialing functionality without the need for additional components.
The present invention meets one or more of the above-referenced needs as described herein in greater detail.